By Seamus Heaney
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Irish Human Rights Commission Writer & Righter By Seamus Heaney Fourth IHRC Annual Human Rights Lecture, 9 December 2009 First published June 2010 By Irish Human Rights Commission 4th Floor, Jervis House Jervis Street Dublin 1 Copyright © of text of Writer & Righter is the sole property of Seamus Heaney Copyright © of publication belongs to the Irish Human Rights Commission ISBN 978-0-9558048-4-7 The Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) was established, under statute in 2000, to promote and protect human rights in Ireland. The human rights that the IHRC protects are the rights, liberties and freedoms guaranteed under the Irish Constitution and the international agreements, treaties and conventions to which Ireland is a party. All human beings are born free & equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason & conscience & should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. www.ihrc.ie 2 & 3 Preface As one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets and prominent advocates for human rights, we invited Seamus Heaney to give our fourth Annual Human Rights Lecture. We considered it an honour when he accepted our invitation. The theme Seamus Heaney chose was the relevance of poetry in times of societal upheaval and unrest. Was it ethical to create poetry when a country or people were in turmoil? Was it ‘right on’ to ‘write on’? He particularly highlighted the differences between the sedentary w-r-i-t-e-r-s and the pro-active r-i-g-h-t-e-r-s, the former whose job it is to reflect and the latter whose role it is to take action. The literary traditions of this country illustrate to us that writers have always ‘written on’ in times of turmoil. They have, as so eloquently described in his lecture, suffered with the sufferers. Those of us who work every day for human rights know the inspiration which writers can give us. Their powerful observations allow us to reflect in ways which would otherwise not be possible. Seamus Heaney has, throughout his career, shown us how a w-r-i-t-e-r can be a r-i-g-h-t-e-r. One of the clearest examples is From the Republic of Conscience, which is one of the most inspirational poems in support of human rights ever written. The simplicity and power of the poem; the idea that the visitor to this Republic became a dual-citizen and representative to speak on behalf of the Republic, which has embassies everywhere, operating independently, and from which no ambassador can be relieved. When thinking about this poem, it brought home to me the sense of responsibility that stirs all of us to act to uphold human rights. It represents the idea that once you become aware of your rights, and the rights of others, you cannot but be a representative for them. You cannot sit idly by and let the rights of others be eroded or abused. It is in this way that writers both inspire righters, and are righters themselves. Seamus Heaney’s work rouses us to press forward with renewed energy. Indeed, we were so moved by his words that night in December we wanted to share the insight of this writer and righter by publishing it. His lecture, given on the eve of Human Rights Day 2009, is a unique contribution to the canon of literature on human rights. We wish to thank him for this inspirational and visceral piece of work which spurs all of us on to take action in the defence of human rights. Maurice Manning President Human Rights Commission Writer & Righter Writer & Righter Fourth IHRC Annual Human Rights Lecture, 9 December 2009 www.ihrc.ie 44 && 55 It’s an honour to give this important lecture, yet to follow speakers as highly respected and qualified as President Mary McAleese and Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg is also something of a test. But then it’s always a test for somebody who practises what Yeats called the ‘sedentary trade’ of writing to stand up and address people who are active in the practical, principled, courageous work of defending human rights. What I experience on these occasions is something like defensiveness, a need to justify the good of the imaginative work done by writers, a need to affirm the value of their particular contribution when faced with the more obviously focused effort of the lawyer taking a case or the aid worker keeping going on the ground or the advocate writing a report on human rights abuses and injustices. So when my respected friend Michael Farrell approached me to speak on this occasion I hesitated - because it struck me that Michael himself would be a better man for the job. For a start, he has far more knowledge and experience in the area of human rights than I have, but that is not his only entitlement. He is also a man with a deeply cultivated literary sensibility – something I’ve been aware of ever since he was a student in a tutorial I taught in the Queen’s University English Department forty years ago. In the meantime, Michael’s intelligence has been at the service of people less gifted than himself, exposed to what the poet John Keats called a world of pain and troubles. And his compassionate response to that world produced a result that can be described in Keats’s terms also: his intelligence has been schooled into becoming a soul, (1) the soul of a conscience-bound individual, passionate, intellectual and answerable; and in that respect he is admirably representative of the values that motivate and sustain every endeavour and every member of the Irish Human Rights Commission. The work of the Commission is worthy of the highest praise, especially at this moment when economic downturn weighs most cruelly upon the under- represented and the underprivileged. The Commission’s endeavours to keep the country’s conscience informed are constant, extensive and urgent, something I discovered when I read a catalogue of the reports and observations it has submitted to the Government in the past few months. To name only a few of the topics listed on its website is to realize how vigilant and indispensable the Commission is proving itself to be. Things it has reported on recently include, for example, the determination of life sentences, the human rights compliance of the Garda Síochána and safeguarding the rights of migrant workers and their families; it has also published observations on the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill (2008), made submissions to the Government on the protection of rights of transgendered persons, on women’s rights in Ireland and the conventions for the elimination of discrimination against women, on racial discrimination, on Travellers’ rights. And that is only a fraction of the reports and submissions and observations listed. Writer & Righter In the course of preparing for this lecture, I came to realize how necessary and admirable a part the Commission plays in our public life, north and south, how many committed people are at work on behalf of the vulnerable and the exploited. Each and every one of these individuals is helping to maintain what we might call the immunity system of the body politic. More obviously than writers, who are also part of that immunity system, human rights workers contribute to the good health of society at local, national and international level; their endeavours are noble and indispensable, even if they cannot guarantee that the noxious conditions they are fighting will be defeated or won’t recur. The great web that unites those local, national and international endeavours has thirty meshes and each of those meshes is woven into and woven out of the document which we celebrate again this evening, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sixty years ago this promulgation made an immense difference to the work of each and every person and indeed nation striving for justice and equality, and each and every person and nation suffering injustice and inequality. In ratifying the principles articulated in the Declaration, the governments of the world gave epoch-making sanction to the human need for fairness and natural justice, and in doing so they strengthened the moral standing of international law. Even if the articles of the Declaration are not legally binding, there is immense potency in the cogent, simple language in which they are framed, as is evident in the all-encompassing first Article: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. On two occasions recently I have heard Mary Robinson argue with great force that the keyword here is dignity, the dignity of the individual, that dignity which is the basis of his or her self-respect and inner freedom at a personal level, and the basis of his or her right to fair treatment and democratic representation at a political level. And behind the primary words and sentiments of that first article, of course, you can hear the echoes of many of the great foundational texts of western civilization, from Sophocles’ paean to the wonders of man in the famous Chorus in his Antigone, through Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, right on up to the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. These documents did undoubtedly lay the foundation for the moral consensus which the Declaration embodies, but the imaginative work of individual creative writers has been equally influential and ameliorating in the formation of human consciousness.